Local issue can get a little loco

Steve Barnes

Published 5:24 pm, Thursday, July 19, 2012

Midway through a cook-off at which I was a judge last weekend, three women related to Mouzon House chef-owner David Pedinotti approached me to complain that they thought he should have won the first round, which went to a team from Mazzone Hospitality.

The key points of the 10-minute harangue by Pedinotti's wife, daughter and, especially, sister-in-law were that they thought the judging should have taken into account Mouzon House's commitment to local ingredients.

A sticking point was my use of the words "intellectual" and "conceptual" to describe the winning dishes by the Mazzone team — Jaime Ortiz and Ken Kehn — when I announced the victor. (I was the spokesman for two other judges.)

"We think very hard about what we do. We support 16 local farms," the Pedinotti camp insisted.

I don't doubt that. But there's a difference between the smart, playful conception and refined plating of the Mazzone Hospitality dishes — an item served in a flowerpot with edible "soil," a clam trio, a deconstructed ratatouille — and the moral, principled approach Mouzon demonstrates in its dedication to local ingredients for its excellent food. Moral and principled aren't the same as intellectual.

And in a setting like the cook-off, where four categories (taste, plating, creativity and use of secret ingredients) received equal weight, it was essentially impossible for Mouzon House to win, given the dishes we were presented with. Let's say, for argument's sake, that Mazzone and Mouzon dishes were all equally delicious and earned the same score for use of secret ingredients. The Mazzone plates were superior in presentation and creativity, in the judges' opinion, and our ratings reflected that — again, using the scoring framework we were given. I would be glad to eat the Mouzon House food again, and would be delighted and impressed if served it in any restaurant. In the context of the competition, however, they were not the best.

"You should do an article on how hard it is to run a restaurant that supports local farms," the Pedinottis said.

The Mouzon House menu mentions that its dishes showcase ingredients from 16 local farmers and other food producers, including lamb and chicken from Sap Bush Hollow Farm near Cobleskill and, from Washington County, Kilpatrick Family Farm vegetables and Dancing Ewe Farm cheese.

But it's not an exclusively locally sourced restaurant. Besides using items like lemons and quinoa that simply aren't produced anywhere near our area, Mouzon House features seafood from an eastern Long Island fishery, mussels from Prince Edward Island and quail from Texas (250 to 1,900 miles away).

That's not criticize the restaurant for inconsistency. I don't think it would be possible for a full-service Capital Region restaurant to survive if it served only food made from ingredients sourced from within, say, 150 miles. Especially in the winter, the menu would be too limited to appeal widely enough to remain viable.

But restaurants that do offer local ingredients whenever possible are to be commended for supporting producers in the area we call home. Whether as a way to lower carbon footprint by reducing delivery distance or out of a belief that an apple from Columbia County will taste better than one from the state of Washington, the commitment in local, seasonal and sustainable is expanding among restaurateurs, chefs and customers.

And farm names on regional restaurants' menus are, happily, an increasingly regular sight. From The Beekman Street Bistro and The Mouzon House in Saratoga to Chez Mike in East Greenbush; from The Wine Bar and Bistro and Capital City Gastropub to The City Beer Hall, all in Albany; and from around the local empire of Mazzone Hospitality, with its year-round standing orders for potatoes from Sheldon Farms in Salem and greens from Little Field Farm in Argyle, restaurateurs are following their own beliefs as well as responding to customer demand and extolling local ingredients.

Diane Pedinotti later sent me a note of regret, saying, "I personally get hung up on what is happening to our food system, and I am often annoyed by zealots. I guess I was one."